Warm And Glowing: Team Of Scientists Creates ‘Atomik’ Chernobyl Vodka

A team of scientists have created a new vodka made with crops and water from inside Chernobyl’s infamous exclusion zone.

Chernobyl is an abandoned Russian nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986, creating a 1000 square mile exclusion zone that’s still unsafe to permanently inhabit, due to the radiation levels. A team of British and Ukrainian scientists have created Vodka using resources from inside that zone, vowing to donate at least 75% of the proceeds to supporting the people and wildlife displaced by the nuclear meltdown, according to Sky News.

The new “Atomik” vodka is “possibly the most important bottle of spirits in the world,” says professor Jim Smith from the University of Portsmouth. Smith conceived the idea for Atomik during the many years he spent studying conservation inside the exclusion zone, reports Sky.

Atomik was produced using grain grown within the exclusion zone, and water pumped from an underground reservoir very near to the Chernobyl power plant itself, according to the New York Times.

Since being abandoned by humans, the towns of Chernobyl have become host to wildlife like this fox. (YouTube/ Chernobyl Zone – Radioactive Team)

Although only one bottle has been produced so far, Smith “hope[s] to begin a small-scale production this year,” with a run of a few hundred bottles, according to Sky.

If Chernobyl vodka isn’t enough to satisfy whatever post-apocalyptic craving you may have, you can experience the ruined world of the exclusion zone, with one of the several companies that offer tours of the area. As radiation continues to drop while public interest remains steady, the failed Russian disaster zone is becoming something of a tourism hotbed.

Yes, higher than background radiation levels stimulate the immune system, making the body more reactive to new aberrant cell types.

The assumption that all radiation at any level is bad is completely wrong. The EPA, stupid-level, assumption is that a given pollutant should be at zero to be acceptable completely ignoring that the toxicity is in the dose. We are constantly assailed by toxins from the environment, but they are at low concentration and thus inconsequential.

IIRC, there were suggestions a couple of decades ago that the death rate from cancers (and perhaps other disorders) was actually reduced in the area, not because of any radiological or biological factors, but simply health care. The theory was that by introducing a 100% screening of the population in the area, a large number of cancers were detected early on of which the vast majority would not be causally related to the accident, and would mostly be treated and cured. Had the accident not happened and the screening not introduced, those cancers and illnesses would still have occurred and, undetected, led to early death.

And the linear, no threshold (LNT) model is obviously wrong. Just consider the evidence of cancer prevalence as a function of altitude. There should be more cancer among populations exposed to higher amounts of cosmic radiation at high altitudes if LNT were correct. In fact, the opposite is found.

I have a theory that the reason the LNT model is so popular is that its adherents are infamiliar with Shannon’s Theory of Information and its application to error correction. There is a analogy between what in electronics is called “error-free transmission of data across a noisy channel” and what in biology is called “DNA replication and repair”. Shannon worked out the theory (look up Shannon-Hartley Law for starters).

In designing electronic transmission of digital data over a data channel with inevitable electronic “noise” it is essential to cope with the certainty that some bits are corrupted during transmission, so that a “1” becomes a “0” or an “A” becomes a “B” and so on. Shannon worked the theory which led to error-correcting codes, so that errors detected and put right at the receiver. The internet, space-probes and almost every digital communication relies on this. The system behaviour of such systems in the face of noise is totally the opposite of analogue: perfect functioning up to some critical value, then total failure; analogue systems degrade gracefully, like hearing an old analogue phone call dissolving progressively into noise and crackles.

Similarly, during cell division, DNA is invariably corrupted locally, but ingenious mechanisms exist to ensure that a missing or defective base-pair is detected and corrected, so that the code is (usually) accurately reconstructed.

In the electronics case, the error-correction fundamentally alters the graph connecting “received error rate” to “noise level”. In the absence of correction, the received error rate (measured in wrong bits per second, say) is directly proportional to the noise level and there is no threshold: a straight line, a “linear no-threshold” connection. In the presence of absolutely perfect correction, the received error rate is a “step”. For low noise level, the received error rate is exactly zero, but at a critical value, the received rate leaps up to exactly 50% (i.e. indistiguishable from random noise) and the system fails catastrophically. The critical value is given by the Shannon-Hartley Law. The behaviour of any practical system is designed and tested to see how close it comes to the ideal behaviour of the S-H Law. In practice this means that instead of a vertical step, one gets a sort of S-shape, with the middle of the “S” representing the critical “threshold” of failure, rather like the median value on LD50 measure of biological toxicity.

If this analogy holds up, then the LNT is blown out of the water. It suggests that the more accurate model is that lifeforms are extremely tolerant of radiation up to some critical value (presumably dependant on species) above which they catastrophically fail, like digital communications.

I don’t think any of the above analogy is exactly new; I met versions of it in the 1970s at college. The perplexing thing is the way that some radiation regulatory boards (and many bedwetters) treat LNT as a consensus truth rather than a fallacy. Is it too much to entertain the notion that if you give 1000 adults 1% of the LD50 dose for cyanide then the most likely outcome is that all of them will survive rather than ten die?

LNT is dogma in the United States. In nuclear science and engineering courses, students are forbidden from even mentioning the idea of radiation hormesis (the beneficial effects of small doses of toxins), and demands acceptance of LNT. But all of the available evidence supports the idea that all surface life on earth requires the presence of ionizing radiation – if only because all of it evolved in the presence of such radiation. Extensive monitoring of Manhattan Project personnel, and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have added tremendous support to this idea.

But anti-nuke activists in the United States have succeeded in terrifying people to the extent that nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear radiation, cannot be called by its legitimate name. It has to be “magnetic resonance imaging,” a sobriquet completely devoid of cognitive content.

I hope these guys succeed. My wife and I are very partial to Russian Standard vodka. Making vodka is the one (and only, it would seem) thing Russia knows how to do very, very well, and I’d buy this stuff any time just to show solidarity.

Actually, the only other thing Russia does very, very well is consuming vodka. In that field, they are the undisputed champions of the world.

It isn’t.
Average background radiation is from memory around 3msV/yr. Plenty of places on granite geology will be up to 10 times that. Say 20-30mSv/yr. Dartmoor UK is so radioactive that a nuclear worker living there would exceed his annual dose just being there without a power station being built at all.

Ramsar in Iran holds the record for ‘natural’ radiation at 200mSv/yr.

A chest CT scan will bang 7mSv into your body. Twice background all in one dose.

has some data. Down the bottom is the data in µSv/hr there are about 8,000 hours in a year so multiply that by 10,000 for a rough order of magnitude of mSv/y

so 20mSv/yr which is natural background for a granite area is around 2µSv/hr

in 2009, when that data was taken, apart from the cemetery where topsoil removal was not done, it was around the <1µSv/hr or 10mSv/yr level.

There is strong evidence from medial nuclear research that in fact the danger of radiation is related not to the total dose but to the peak dose received. Up to a point DNA 'parity checks' its two halves and if they don't match the cell dies. To mutate it requires, it seems, two identical mutations in each strand of the helix.

The chances of that happening under low dose radiations are vanishingly small. However as a threshold of high radiation levels is reached it becomes extremely likely. Wade Allison who is the de facto expert on this claims that the figure is in the hundreds of mSv In a few minutes time scale :

How many deaths due to radiation might there be as a result of the Fukushima accident? Thirty workers received doses as high as 100-250 mSv but the lowest dose suffered by any worker at Chernobyl who died of ARS was 2000 mSv and that was within 3 or 4 weeks. So it is no surprise that no death at Fukushima from ARS has been reported and none will be in the future. What about cancer in years to come? Of the 5,949 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received doses in this range 732 died of solid cancer (and 14 of leukaemia) against expected numbers 691 (and 15). The difference, 40, is a measure of the number of cancer deaths caused by radiation for an acute dose in this range – as a proportion it is 1 in 150. That proportion of 30 people is less than 1, meaning that it is unlikely that any worker will die of cancer from radiation in the next 50 years. The public at Fukushima have received far lower doses and are in no danger at all, except through the punitive effect of the regulations themselves. Something is fundamentally wrong with this safety culture. It was wrong at Chernobyl and the same errors have been repeated at Fukushima with tragic consequences for peoples lives and the Japanese economy.

I think that the key point here, that Wade makes far better than I can, is the massive disjunct between what the regulatory regime , based on models that are known to be flawed, says and what the reality actually is.

The regulations say that Chernobyl is off limits. The real world data suggests that apart from the reactor site itself it’s completely safe.

But who wants to be the bureaucrat that says ‘OK you can all go home’ and then someone dies of cancer – from normal causes – and blames it on Chernobyl?

I had testicular cancer. I asked my top of the line oncologist from a top of the line hospital ‘why did I get it?’

He shrugged his shoulders and said ‘birth control pills in the water supply? agro chemicals? passing cosmic ray? pure bad luck? Your guess is as good as mine….

The major impact of a large doses of high-energy ionizing radiation follows the production of copious radiolyzed water in the body.

The flood of free radicals – mostly hydroxyl radical and hydrogen atoms — massively attacks proteins and tissues. Body systems are widely disrupted. Death typically follows in days to weeks.

Atomik vodka is a great idea. Vodka is a distilled liquor. Carefully done, no radiation ends up in the vodka, even if the originating potatoes (or whatever) are radioactive (apart from C-14).

We had ex-Soviet military (Jewish refugee) in my postdoc lab. Rafi Z introduced the Friday afternoon custom of pouring freezing vodka over a layer of tomato juice. All taken in a 100 mL graduated pyrex beaker. 50 cc of each, carefully measured, layered clear over red. 🙂

The vodka was stored in the freezer. It was good and cold, and poured with a deliberate viscosity that engendered respect.

The ice-cold vodka burned its way down the throat, followed by a soothing flow of tomato juice. Proper protocol included shaking some pepper into the vodka prior to slugging the whole thing back. No sipping.

According to Rafi – the local expert — large-grain Russian pepper adsorbed the oils from cheap vodka, immobilizing and removing them from the taste-stream, and improved the experience. I took his word for it and applied the pepper.

It’s not the “typical” levels which are dangerous, it’s the hotspots, where small bits of radioactive debris fell. If you are going to live eat and work there, you will be encountering levels much higher than the average.

Since food production will be banned or certainly boycotted by the eco-zealots for the next millennium or three, perhaps as well as knocking out vodka, we could grow crops for EU fuel additives and ease off tearing rain forest up in the green enthusiasm for getting it wrong as usual.

You are right : older people should not live any longer, they are just a burden on us (pensions and all that), a bit of radioactivity will help us getting rid of them lot. I just told my parents about it, strangely, they did not agree.)

You don’t mention a synagogue in the town, along with the churches, mosques and temples? There’s never been an incident of racial or religious violence in 400 years? So Jews were never there and the city did not experience the pogroms (a Russian word)? That suggests the city is not in western Russia (or what later became Poland and Ukraine).

Still, I accept that there may be a city unique in the entire world – not a single incident of racial or religious unrest in 400 years. And that it may even be in Russia! (Can you tell us which city it is?)

Jews were not allowed to live in Russia proper until after the 1917 Revolution except by special permit. The Jews who lived in the Russian Empire before WWI lived in areas that had been part of the Grand Duchy of Poland Lithuania (which correspond to modern Lithuanian, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine) most of which was annexed to the Russian Empire by the Tsars in the 18th Century. Those areas were called the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist times. Jews did not need permits to live there and millions of Jews did.

There are religious temples of all sorts in the city. It’s called Ufa and irrespective of the condemnation of Russia by people who trawl through history books, I am assured by my acquaintance of the cities positive aspects. He’s a journalist, so educated and inquiring and, of course he actually lives there.

He tells me the Russian people, who can actually be bother with the west, are laughing at our attitude to climate change, amongst many other things. Nor does he have a problem with Putin who, he says, is loved by Russians for being the man Donald Trump is trying to be. He cares for his country and couldn’t give a monkeys about the west.

First hand information here. Not distorted by the MSM or the governments of the west determined to paint Russia as some sort of evil empire.

The country did what the west asked. It gave up communism, freed it’s people, cut loose it’s former satellite states and agreed nuclear treaties with the USA and Europe. But somehow, that’s just not good enough.

I wasn’t condemning Russia, just expressing scepticism that any city or country has had no religious or racial friction over the last 400 years.

Ufa is the capital of Baskortostan, an ethnic republic within Russia. As the name indicates, its native population is not Russian, but Bashkir, a Turkic group. It was incorporated into by Ivan the Terrible in the 1500s. The Bashkirs are Sunni Muslims. There is a Jewish population, and a synagogue in Ufa. (You can find nice things by trawling through history).

I have no issue with your friend’s report that it’s a nice place to live. Sounds like a positive ad for the benefits of communism: low taxes, low crime, free medical care.

Neither Ce 137 nor Sr 90 can make their way into ethanol (C2H5OH). And any amount of radioactive salts that may happen do be in the water/alcohol phase at the start of the distillation process will not be transferred through evaporation/condensation. So you may safely enjoy this vodka gimmick.

Chernobyl is in the Ukraine ( Украї́на -Border land) just 10km from the border with Byelorussia – Белоруссия (White Russia).

From Wikipedia:
In the second half of the 18th century, Chernobyl became a major center of Hasidic Judaism.
Chernobyl had a population of 10,800 in 1898, including 7,200 Jews. Chernobyl was occupied in World War ; Ukrainians and Bolsheviks fought over the city in the ensuing Civil War. In the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20, Chernobyl was taken first by the Polish Army and then by cavalry of the Red Army. From 1921 onward, it was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR.
Between 1929 and 1933, Chernobyl suffered from killings during Stalin’s collectivization campaign. It was also affected by the famine that resulted from Stalin’s policies. The Polish and German community of Chernobyl was deported to Kazakhstan in 1936, during the Frontier Clearances.
During World War II, Chernobyl was occupied by the German Army from 25 August 1941 to 17 November 1943. The Jewish community was murdered during the Nazi occupation
Several miles outside of Chernobyl, was site of the ‘Russian Woodpecker’, part of an anti-ballistic missile early warning radar network.

Rich Davis, you are correct. This was a Soviet nuclear station.
Ukraine now is not a Russian territory, and, after occupation of Crimea and murdering of thousands of Ukrainians by Putin’s armed proxies, never will be.

Alex: Crimea has been Russian for Centuries (taken in battle from the Ottoman in 1783) but Khruschev gave it to Ukraine as a gift in 1954 – little suspecting that the Soviet Union would ever fall apart. Notably, Khruschev was the head of the Ukraine Communist Party from the 1930s. In 1954, Russians made up 75% of the population of Crimea. Being a sceptic, I always look into the background of the news.

Re: Hiroshima bombing: radiation had returned to background in less than a year and they rebuilt the city. Ditto Chernobyl. The Exclusion Zone is now essentially a Serengeti type game park. Animals that had be harmed by radiation got eaten by wolves!! and babushkas of 75-80yrs old have been picking mushrooms and berries in the Exclusion Zone for decades.

Yeah fake news is the worst it’s ever been, but it isn’t new. I don’t trust much in the news about ‘sensitive’ topics.

Kruschev proposed this handover casually but did not follow proper procedure. The question should have been submitted to the open discussion of the Supreme Council of the Russian SSR. Moreover, a referendum should have been conducted to find out the opinion of the residents of the two republics. Nothing of that happened. The Presidium of the Supreme Council gathered for a session on February 19, 1954 – only 13 of 27 members were present. There was no quorum, but the decision was adopted unanimously.

The Supreme Council of Russia ruled in 1992 that the Crimean region had been delivered to Ukraine illegitimately.

The referendum held in 2014 was very clear on the matter:
The official result from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was a 96.77 percent vote for integration of the region into the Russian Federation with an 83.1 percent voter turnout.

A geiger counter will also read high radiation in the vicinity of a smoke detector as smoke detectors use a radioactive source which would be dangerous if you placed it under your pillow for example.

Rather than talk about how bad or not so bad Chernobyl was/is we should be talking about the 50 year old reactor design that has no catastrophic failure modes, is six time more fuel efficient than a fuel rod, water cooled reactor, and that is cost competitive with natural gas.

The reactor design in question is the only thermal spectrum type reactor that can be used for breeding.

There are two general types of reactors:

1) Thermal spectrum reactors use either water or graphite (which the nuclear industry calls the substance that is used to slow down the neutrons a ‘moderator’) to slow down the neutrons to the speed of uranium atoms which greatly increase the chance of neutron absorption. This enables thermal spectrum reactors to use 5% enriched U235.

2) Fast Spectrum reactors. Fast spectrum reactors use so called fast neutron, that is neutron that have not been slowed down neutrons. As fast neutrons are less likely to be absorbed, fast spectrum reactors require more neutrons and hence higher enriched uranium, enriched to 20%.

By international law the maximum enriched Uranium for commercial reactors is 5%. Thermal spectrum reactors if they have a coolant failure can have a core meltdown which produces a dirty fission explosion which is estimated to be equivalent to roughly 710 kg of explosives.

Thermal spectrum reactor failures cannot produce a dirty fission explosion. Thermal spectrum reactors are blowing up and melting down due to hydrogen explosions (radiation and neutrons breaks the water bond producing hydrogen and the cladding of the fuel rods also reacts with water vapor to form hydrogen and heat) and due to failure of water cooling systems which require flowing water to avoid a core meltdown.

Chernobyl is an abandoned Russian nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986, creating a 1000 square mile exclusion zone that’s still unsafe to permanently inhabit, due to the radiation levels.

No.

Not ‘still unsafe to permanently inhabit’ rather ‘above levels that a 50 – year old theory that has been debunked completely, but upon which safety regulations are still based, says should not be exceeded’.

It looks like an outstanding marketing scheme for the vodka.
I have a “Revigator Radium Ore” clay water dispenser.
Popular in the early 1900s, water was put in overnight and the “radiation” was good for your health.
And in it I’ve kept a clipping from the WSJ, dated August 1, 1990.
The headline is:
“The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came off”
In 1927, a wealthy guy from NYC got on to the elixir, which could cure a 150 maladies.
Even used it on his race horses.
And he died of “radium poisoning” in 1932.
Gruesome death as his bones were disintegrating.
The guy’s name was Byers and he was on the board of Westinghouse Electric.

As always, the dose is the toxin.
Byers’ dose from his huge intake must have exceeded 10 Gy at the bone lining cells from the ~5MeV 226Ra alpha particles emitted from the neighboring bone (~30 microns range).
Radium is a bone-seeker being a group II element (Ca, Mg, Ba, Sr, Ra).

It wasn’t the “Revigator” that killed him, it contains far to little radium to be dangerous, though the chemicals smeared on the inside are definitely not healthy (arsenic among other things)

He used “Radithor” a radium elixir that, unfortunately, did contain significant amounts of radium. And he used three bottles a day (and shared it with his girlfriend). About 500 bottles would be considered a deadly dose today.

Now of all radioactive element the one you most definitely should not drink is radium since it is chemically similar to calcium and settles into the skeleton. This is very bad since the bone marrow is by far the tissue most sensitive to radiation (this why it is possible to kill off the bone marrow and the replace it by a stem cell transplant without killing the patient as well).

In the 1900-1930 period the miraculous and healthy effects of radioactivity were as widely and erroneously believed in as the miraculous and deadly effects of radioactivity is believed in today.

Kruschev proposed this handover casually but did not follow proper procedure. The question should have been submitted to the open discussion of the Supreme Council of the Russian SSR. Moreover, a referendum should have been conducted to find out the opinion of the residents of the two republics. Nothing of that happened. The Presidium of the Supreme Council gathered for a session on February 19, 1954 – only 13 of 27 members were present. There was no quorum, but the decision was adopted unanimously.

The Supreme Council of Russia ruled in 1992 that the Crimean region had been delivered to Ukraine illegitimately.

The referendum held in 2014 was very clear on the matter:
The official result from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was a 96.77 percent vote for integration of the region into the Russian Federation with an 83.1 percent voter turnout.

Chernobyl: the wildlife haven created when people left | Travel | The Guardian

28.05.2019 · Chernobyl: the wildlife haven created when people left … The Ukrainian site is now popular for its eerie ghost town and reactor ruins, but on this side of the …https://www.pri.org › stories › c…

How did Chernobyl become a refuge for wildlife? –
Public Radio International

13.05.2019 · The initial impact of the catastrophe on nature was important, but the exclusion zone has now become a …

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